Most of us don't eat enough fruit and veggies. It's so easy to eat processed stuff and meat and cheese instead. It takes effort to eat a healthy diet. I happen to agree with Michael Pollan who wrote "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." But how can we safely eat mostly plant matter when it has toxic chemicals sprayed on it?

There are several tricks to getting or making clean food. The first and most obvious is to grow it yourself. Unfortunately gardening is time-consuming, and you can't get tomatoes in winter. Some folks can't or won't grow food. Grow what you can when you can, and forgive yourself when you can't. Home-grown tomatoes are one of the great pleasures in life.

If you're not going to grow it yourself, perhaps you have a job that will allow you to buy clean organic produce. There's more of it available all the time. If you have a local source of produce that isn't organic certified but is still cleaner than grocery store produce, use that. Farmer's markets are nice because you can talk to the farmer about what they use to manage pests and weeds.

The plant foods that you should try to buy clean are listed by the environmental working group every year as the "dirty dozen". The 2017 list (below) includes many of our favorite fruits and veggies.

The EPA sets limits for pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and other chemicals on food, and those limits are not zero. There's no way you can avoid every toxin in or on commercial food, but it's worth some effort to minimize your exposures. Young people and children have the most to gain in terms of healthy life years.

Some contaminants are easier to remove than others. Strawberries are covered in little pores and it is impossible to get the pesticides off (out) of them, so it is important to buy those organic or choose another fruit. Apples are also hard to clean because they can have a coat of parrafin (to make them shiny) that seals in the pesticides. Potatoes may be less important to buy organic if you peel off a good layer and boil them too. Boiling has been shown to remove or destroy some of the contaminants.

A review of the literature reveals that washing your veggies in tap water for 30 seconds actually removes most of the pesticides and fungicides. Unfortunately there are some that water does not remove, including chlorpyrifos (a nerve-gas pesticide) and vinclozolin (a fungicide). Thankfully these are removed by soaking in an acid solution, acetic acid being the most effective. Acetic acid is vinegar. The longer you soak your veggies the more of the chlorpyrifos is removed. My rule is to soak my cherries in a 5% vinegar solution for at least an hour.

Why do we care about chlorpyrifos? You may have heard about it in the news. It was originally developed as a nerve gas by the Nazis. Now it is used as a pesticide because it paralyzes insects. No surprise that it also wreaks havoc on the human nervous system. It was slated to be banned until Trump got elected. It's already banned for indoor use. Dow chemical (the maker of chlorpyrifos) donated a million bucks to Trump's inauguration fund to make sure that their profitable poison would remain legal. The EPA reversed course and this toxin will be sprayed on veggies and golf courses, in spite of the fact that it shrinks and deforms children's brains, lowers their IQs, and is linked to lung cancer and Parkinsons. Chlorpyrifos sticks to fruit even when it's rinsed in tap water.

For the foreseeable future we will need to work to avoid this toxin as best we can. This means seeking clean sources for our produce (gardens, farmer's markets, buying organic), washing it, peeling and boiling what can be peeled and boiled, and soaking plants that we eat with the skin on in a vinegar solution for at least an hour.

If you need a little good news to help wash off the sad feeling about all this poison, below are the kinds of food least likely to be contaminated. =-] Eat more of them.

​The photograph above is a wild ginger plant in the genus Asarum. I photographed it last week in the woods near my father's house. Don't eat it. We know this. Some plants are poison. Naturopaths know about aristolochic acid because it is part of our training in botanical medicine.

Medicine in the US today is as polarized as our politics, and just as full of talking points and bald faced lies. I find it infuriating and frustrating. Today I read a hit piece attacking naturopathic doctors. It claimed that we push herbs that contain aristolochic acid (AA). AA is a known carcinogen in the bladder and kidneys, and a new study suggests that it's causing a lot of liver cancer too. It really ticks me off when headlines say we push people to take poison. Not so. We are here to guard against such mistakes.

Chinese herbal products have often been found to contain toxins, and to be mis-labeled or not labeled at all. Herbs containing AA can be found in Chinese weight loss formulas, among other places Here in the good old US we may complain about the shady politics in the FDA, but at some level they really are trying to protect us. They're doing better than the Chinese authorities, far as I can tell.

There's been an incredible increase in the wealth of the Chinese middle class in the last 25 years. Suddenly people have jobs, cars, and disposable income. They are eating more sugar than they ever have before, and they are getting fat, even getting diabetes. The Chinese are looking more and more like US.

Combine their new obesity, disposable income, and good supply of poorly regulated herbal products, and you can understand why the Chinese are getting cancer from AA. Lots of other people in Asia, like the Taiwanese, are having the same problem.

We've known about AA for a long time. The FDA issued a warning about it in 2001 which is when it came onto a lot of people's radar.

If you would like to know if an herbal formula or a supplement is safe to take, there is no one better to consult than a naturopath. We study on which herbs are useful and which are dangerous.

It is true that the vast majority of herbal products are not very well tested. You have to do the research to find out which ones are good, or ask a naturopath. Some companies have excellent quality assurance standards, and some do not. If you are going to take a product, you want to know if it contains what it says on the label. You also want to know that it does not contain anything toxic. Third party testing of products is expensive and most companies don't do it. If you buy the cheapest herbs you can get, you are probably choosing the ones that haven't been checked. Just so you know.

The people who are dedicated to the project of smearing alternative medicine don't know much about it, but that doesn't slow them down. It has become disgustingly normal, especially online, to just say whatever you want as if it were true, and keep saying it until the dimwitted come to believe you.

Don't let them brainwash you. Keep your wits sharp. Gather information and challenge your own assumptions. There is disinformation on all sides, and medicine is as rich a medium for BS as politics.

Just because something is natural does not make it safe. Just because something is herbal does not make it dangerous. If you're going to experiment with herbs, do your research--or get some help from someone who has. And don't buy imported herbs online. Please.